Cantos

Calgary’s National Music Centre project just received $25m from Alberta and the federal government

My short article in last week’s issue, arguing that Los Angeles architect Zoltan Pali should build the Cantos Music Foundation’s new National Music Centre in Calgary, was roundly ignored by the jury, who preferred Portland architect Brad Cloepfil and his Allied Works Architecture.

In an otherwise lucid column, the normally lucid Globe architecture writer Lisa Rochon shows the danger that attends anyone who reflexively underestimates her subjects. In this case, Rochon has decided that if Calgarians don’t like a planned new footbridge by the extraordinary Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, it’s because Calgarians are heathen. Or, as she puts it, “petty, chauvinistic… whinging… childish.”

They packed the Grand Theatre last night in Calgary for the public unveiling of the five proposals on the short list for the Cantos Music Foundation’s King Edward Hotel renaissance project. (Background is available in my earlier blog post here.) Finally the scale and the entirely salutary eccentricity of Cantos’s ambition is clear: they want to build a National Music Centre worthy of the name — in, over and around the skeleton of a tattered old blues dive in the heart of one of the country’s sketchiest neighbourhoods. But transformation is at the heart of this project. The East Village redevelopment will be one of the country’s most ambitious urban-design projects over the next few years. The Cantos National Music Centre is a keystone for the East Village project. And now Cantos has lured a handful of the world’s most audacious architects into a public battle for the right to kick off that transformation.